Secure distributed systems

Distributed systems involve multiple components communicating across networks, creating an expanded attack surface with many potential points of vulnerability. A breach in one component can cascade through the entire system, compromising data integrity, confidentiality, and availability. You must implement comprehensive security measures that prevent data breaches and service disruptions without impairing performance and reliability.

Securing distributed systems requires a defense-in-depth approach that addresses network security, service-to-service authentication, data protection, and monitoring. This involves implementing zero trust principles, securing communication channels, and establishing robust identity and access management across all system components.

Implement zero trust architecture

Zero trust architecture treats every component as potentially compromised and requires continuous verification of identity and authorization. This approach prevents lateral movement attacks where an attacker gains access to one component and then moves through the system.

Start by implementing service mesh technology like Consul to manage service-to-service communication. Consul provides automatic service discovery, health checking, and secure communication between services. Configure Consul to use mutual TLS (mTLS) for all service communications, ensuring that only authenticated and authorized services can communicate with each other.

Use Vault to manage secrets and certificates dynamically. Vault can automatically generate and rotate X.509 certificates for service authentication, eliminating the need for long-lived credentials. Configure Vault to integrate with your service mesh to provide automatic certificate injection and rotation.

Secure communication channels

All communication between distributed system components must be encrypted and authenticated. Implement TLS for all network communications, including internal service-to-service traffic. Use strong cipher suites and ensure proper certificate management.

Configure your load balancers and API gateways to terminate TLS and validate client certificates. This provides an additional layer of security by ensuring that only authorized clients can access your services. Use Consul Connect to automatically encrypt traffic between services without requiring application-level changes.

Implement network segmentation to isolate different components of your distributed system. Use firewalls and network policies to restrict communication between services to only what is necessary. This limits the potential impact of a breach by preventing unauthorized access to other system components.

Monitor and respond to threats

Implement comprehensive monitoring and logging across all distributed system components. Use centralized logging to collect and analyze security events from all services. Configure alerts for suspicious activities such as failed authentication attempts, unusual network traffic patterns, or unauthorized access attempts.

Use Vault's audit logging to track all access to secrets and sensitive data. This provides visibility into who is accessing what resources and when, helping you detect potential security incidents. Configure automated responses to security events, such as automatically revoking compromised credentials or blocking suspicious IP addresses.

Regularly conduct security assessments and penetration testing of your distributed system. This helps identify vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them. Use automated security scanning tools to continuously monitor for known vulnerabilities in your dependencies and infrastructure.

Next steps

In this article, you learned about implementing comprehensive security controls for distributed systems, including zero trust architecture, secure communication channels, and threat monitoring.

In this section of Design resilient systems, you learned about implementing comprehensive security controls for distributed systems, including zero trust architecture, secure communication channels, and threat monitoring. Secure distributed systems is part of the Design resilient systems pillar.

Refer to the following documents to learn more about securing distributed systems:

• Prevent lateral movement to implement network segmentation and access controls
• Protect sensitive data to secure data at rest and in transit
• Authenticate workloads with TLS certificates to implement certificate-based authentication
• Build a certificate authority to establish trust in your distributed system
• Store static secrets to manage authentication credentials securely